Principal Backend Architect

Latino Legends

3d•Remote

About The Position

The Principal Backend Architect will own backend architecture for a US-based software company’s business-critical platform, which includes a large monolith and a growing ecosystem of microservices. This principal-level individual contributor role combines architectural ownership with hands-on implementation; there are no direct reports, and production development remains a core part of the position. The architect will shape the backend ecosystem—including the monolith, microservices, APIs, messaging infrastructure, and integrations—establish engineering standards, and guide the platform’s incremental evolution toward well-defined services. The role works closely with the Lead/Principal Architect, Principal UI Architect, and Data Architect to drive technical direction across the platform. It also includes mentoring engineers, contributing to incident response and planning, and helping the team adopt AI-assisted engineering practices. The engagement is full-time and remote from Latin America as an international independent contractor. Compensation is listed as $45–$52 USD per hour in the role overview and $45–$50 USD per hour in the engagement details, depending on experience and fit. Timesheets are required; days off, sick days, and local holidays are not billable. Company hardware will be shipped to the selected candidate. The anticipated start date is approximately four weeks after the offer is signed.

Requirements

At least 10 years of backend engineering experience, including several years in architecture or technical leadership roles at the principal level.
Deep, hands-on expertise in C# and .NET, with a proven record designing and delivering secure, scalable, and resilient commercial backend systems.
Practical experience with Azure services, particularly Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Data Factory.
Experience with PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Snowflake, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices.
Demonstrated success incrementally decomposing large monolithic systems, prioritizing safe, reversible changes over disruptive rewrites.
Strong understanding of event-driven and asynchronous architectures, including message ordering, idempotency, poison messages, retries, and dead-letter queues.
Extensive experience with API design, service contracts, versioning, and backward compatibility.
Strong data-access fundamentals, including query optimization, zero-downtime migrations, and handling inconsistent or complex customer data.
Proven production ownership, including observability, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
Daily, hands-on use of AI development tools such as Claude, Claude Code, or comparable agentic engineering tools.
Practical experience building AI-powered solutions involving agents, reusable skills, MCP servers, or evaluations.
Excellent written and spoken English, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
Pragmatic engineering mindset, strong judgment, and demonstrated ability to elevate engineers and teams.
Ability to provide concrete examples of personally owned production architectural decisions, including trade-offs and measurable outcomes.
A record of influencing engineering practices across multiple teams and guiding complex transformations without formal management authority.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading the incremental decomposition of a large monolith is particularly valuable.
Experience collaborating across backend, frontend, and data architecture.

Responsibilities

Own backend architecture across the platform and lead incremental decomposition of the large monolith into well-defined, maintainable services.
Establish backend engineering standards, best practices, and tooling, including shared libraries, service templates, and cross-cutting platform capabilities.
Lead API and contract design, including versioning, backward compatibility, and reliable communication among internal services, frontend applications, and external integrations.
Own event-driven architecture using Azure Service Bus, including message delivery guarantees, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
Define scalable patterns for customer and partner integrations so failures are observable, traceable, and recoverable.
Collaborate with the Data Architect on data ownership, transactional boundaries, access patterns, and query performance.
Improve platform reliability, security, observability, and cloud cost efficiency.
Champion AI-assisted engineering practices and expand team capabilities through practical adoption of AI tools and workflows.
Mentor engineers, review critical pull requests, facilitate technical office hours, and document architectural decisions through Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
Contribute to incident response, technical interviews, quarterly planning, and occasional customer-facing technical discussions.
Continue hands-on development and translate architectural decisions into reliable, scalable production systems.